Near and Far Faith

It's great to see things come to fruition. I've been talking for a long time about letting go of responsibility to people who are better gifted and equipped. There are two areas where I've seen this come to pass recently:

Production Director. I got this idea from Los. Basically I've turned over a large part of my worship and communications responsibility to Dan as our production director. His role is directing the production that is Sunday AM. It's taken some transition time, but Dan now schedules all our music and our musicians. He tells me what to sing. As we move forward he has a great passion for events that I'm excited to see come to frutition as well (our Good Friday benefit concert last year? That was all Dan's idea). He's also deeply involved in the creative process. It's exciting. And he's a volunteer. What a great example of giving someone a task that fits their gifts to combat volunteer under-commitment.

SLT. Last week we met as a leadership team for Ignite Students and I started the ball rolling on so responsibilities for the Student Leadership Team. I've been encouraged to see even in the past few days some efforts expanding. For example - our website is never up to date. That's now in the hands of a few students. and just like Dan, now a couple of students schedule all our music and musicians - they even held auditions (they learned a lot through that one!). I'm also getting some students ready to teach on Tuesdays.

One thing I'm really pumped about is our focus for 2009 - the environment for Ignite Students. Our goal is to create an environment with an element of shock due to the care and effort put into just the surroundings... that can be built up and torn down every Tuesday. I already have a student gifted at staging (she's been helping produce Nazareth High's theater programs for years - even helped host Ms. PA this year) coming into help adjust our stage lighting. It's my area and I'm clueless.And our 1st Impressions team is getting more and more creative.

Just talking about this stuff fuels me up. I never want to hog responsibility and ministry. This success helps me keep that in the front of my mind.